


Some Days Are For Dying

by PaxVobis



Series: The Early Demos [3]
Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Afterlife, Evil eye, Eyes, Hell, Hell Is Here, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internal Conflict, Magnus As Odin, Mentions of Myth & Folklore, Minor Character Death, Nathan POV, Other, Outer Space, Past Character Death, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Sacred Trees, Superstition, Visions in dreams, Wakes & Funerals, dante's inferno, fa la la it's off to Hell we go, post-doomstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 03:40:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13515843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Nathan, hounded by nightmares, wants to be sure that Magnus is dead.M15+ only, implied sexual content.





	Some Days Are For Dying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [little_murmaider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/gifts), [walkwithursus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkwithursus/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10915878) by [little_murmaider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/pseuds/little_murmaider). 



In Nathan’s dreams, Magnus was alive.

Sometimes, waking with a snort and clutching his pillow with his blunt black nails, Nathan found himself wondering if he truly was dead, if what he could see beyond the veil could be so vivid as this.  Did he really have evidence that Magnus was dead – had he seen a body, was he sure?  But the fact was he had, and he had seen the corpse sent into the furnace and the scalded bones scraped up and crudely pulverised, and run the ashes and chunks of bone over his thick fingers.  Cloying grey dust that could only be a corpse, like the sand that ran through an hourglass, that ran through his fingers, and yet – like Magnus – clung on, until Nathan had brushed off his hands, disgusted, and wiped them on his jeans, and condemned the remains to the earth.

Yeah, so he’d seen him dead and buried, and better, he’d seen the asshole cremated.  Incinerated and shoved into a tiny little wooden box and buried under the decrepit warden tree that stood out lonely on the southernmost cliffs of Mordland.  Soon the box would rot in the damp and heavy soil, and the ashes would seep into it and the tree would wrap its roots around the bones and leach even the nutrients out of Magnus’ remains – to absorb and destroy him, impossible to reclaim, to resurrect, to pull from the grave again.  Nathan had wanted to be totally sure Magnus was dead.  When he went to the tree to stare it down, he could even see the turned earth where the klokateers had buried him, undisturbed since that time.  The man was dead, and that was that.

Still, he dreamed.

Perhaps what was disturbing about these dreams was not that Magnus was alive, but rather that he was more than living.  In reality, Magnus had always been disappointing; even when Nathan saw him after ten years of radio silence (granted, imposed by Dethklok) he had been weirded out by how pathetic the man had been – sickly, pale, dead-eyed, _cloying._   Magnus had all the social presence of a coyote with sarcoptic mange.  It wasn’t just an _old_ thing, it was a Magnus thing, like that was inherent to him – he was a screwed up, unpleasant, sulky shut-in who almost sucked the awe out of people, such a revulsion he inspired in anyone with half the wits to pick up on it.  It was impossible to be impressed by Magnus in the flesh beyond at just how fucked he was.

His corpse in the morgue chamber had been equally underwhelming.  It had laid there so open and vulnerable, the killing wound in his gut all gaping like a fucking cunt, his blood a thick stench, and Nathan hated it for that.  To stand over it knowing that he had won, and yet – there was nothing he could do.  Nothing he could take back.  Magnus had never had anything to give him, he wasted away everything he stole from them.  Lying there all anaemic and violated and, and fuck, Nathan didn’t know what to do with him.  How could a corpse still feel like it was controlling his hand, controlling him through its very vulnerability?  There was nothing Nathan could do.  He just had to keep telling himself that at least he was alive – and Magnus was dead.  There was nothing he could do, at all, to anyone, any more.  Nothing but rot.

In Nathan’s dreams, he was not in a place so much as a depth – hard to explain what he dreamt at all, he had no words to put it into.  It was like, outer-space, you know... black and endless, and stars, and Nathan was still Nathan but he wasn’t a body, just part of it – of gravity.  Something moving in the nothingness, like a black hole.  There were communications, songs – yeah, whales, okay.  Baleful and slow cries that pulled him apart, and every night he spent haunted, his mind wide awake within his slumber.  Nathan could not understand them.  He did not know what to do.  He woke up distressed, physically ill.  He knew something was coming.  But he did not know what to do.

In his dreams, he sought the answers.  Felt out into the galaxy for other presences – desperately, for Charles’, less so for the others’.  It did not yield much; he knew they were out there but they were not as strong as Nathan’s force, and drowned against the whales’ plaintive cries.  By the time of Magnus’ burial, the cries had been driving him insane with their fucking neediness, their demands that he did something but no explanation as to what.  He pulled at the galaxy as though it were reams of black cloth in his hands, dragging it this way and that searching for what he needed to find, but there was no answer.  Only that he’d ‘know’.  He was starting to resent those Black Klok freaks for that.

But after they’d buried him, he started to _feel_ Magnus.  It was just a dream, Nathan would remind himself, something he’d generated inside his own mind, as he didn’t believe in the kind of magic that could let Magnus enter his dreams – not once he was dead.  It was a throbbing presence, uneasy and unsettling, that same unplaceable and yet piercing feeling that Magnus’ eye had after the corneal scarring had clouded it, but which Magnus himself had possessed long before.  Initially, Nathan had pulled away from it, took it as an evil eye – a sign that he was headed in the wrong direction. But the creatures urged him back, like they were asking him to move towards this presence, and the nearer he moved – begrudgingly – the stronger that feeling became.  That he was still alive.  Little blisters of black, white, blue, black, like stars against the black fabric of the galaxy, but they weren’t stars – concentric, black, white, blue, black.  Little eyes.  Swarming. 

God, he fucking hated it.

Magnus was dead.  Nathan was so sure of it.  But his dreams were filling with this blistering, these eyes, until there was no room to move and nothing but the flashing pain they shot through him, and the voices seemed to align into meaning – distorted, so many voices, but it sounded almost like: _You must see Magnus._

And he awoke again, clutching his pillow.  His shoulders tight as he raised them.  Magnus was dead.  He couldn’t be seen, he was a bunch of bones and white shit in a fucking box.  This wasn’t a _you must destroy the record_ thing, this wasn’t something that could actually be _done._   Magnus didn’t even exist anymore.  There was nothing he could do.

But the dreams were relentless.  As the weeks drew by – as Toki healed, as the sky grew dark above – Nathan was waking several times a night, dreaming of nothing but the message, the beckoning.  He was no longer sure that was what they said.  Perhaps it was... _we foresee madness._   If he didn’t work it the fuck out Nathan was _going_ to go mad.  Or perhaps it was... _we foresee murder._   Or perhaps... _we must eat magnets._   God!  Another fucking sleepless night.  Nathan’s skin was crawling from his body, cowering in his sheets, curling in on himself.  Knowing as soon as he closed his eyes it would return.  Black, white, blue, black.

Here was a single room apartment in Tampa Bay, CDs scattered face up over the floor.  Nathan standing over them, looking down at them, at Magnus sat on the edge of his mattress hunched over himself and writing on the CDs with a permanent marker as they awkwardly chatted about all the bands Magnus hated, and all the bands Nathan hated.  Here was Nathan sitting on the end of the same mattress, peering through the gloomy room at a bunch of chains and bullshit hanging off the knob on a chest of drawers.  A glimpse of a bead, strung onto something in there along with little amulets, junk – concentric circles – black, white, blue, black.  In fact there were many, all along this bracelet, tied into the lashings.

Magnus following his gaze and looking down at the chains where he stood by the open dresser, hitching his belt back together.  _You want one?  I don’t wear ‘em_ , he offered, and leaned down to run them over his long fingers.  Nathan pointed and stayed pointing until Magnus had the bracelet in his fingers.  _This?  No, man, that’s special._ When that was not sufficient, laughing softly, _Mom brought it back for me._

Nathan grunted, balling his fist under his chin.  The word sounded so weird on Magnus’ tongue, as _if_ someone who was such an _adult_ had a mom who brought them gifts and shit.  But he did.  She did.  He imagined Magnus, but older, and a woman – not hard.  He was womanly, Magnus, in a way Nathan couldn’t put into words. 

 _It’s got... eyes_ , he said eventually, and Magnus let them slip off his knuckles again and straightened.

_Yeah.  Evil eye – err.  It's junk. Meant to ward them off... superstitious bullshit._

And Nathan gazed at it, and thought nothing.

Black, white, blue, black.  Nathan clung to his pillow as he awoke, his nails digging into the case, his eyes red and fixed open.  Black, white, blue, black.  How the hell was he supposed to ‘see’ a dead man?  He was ready to give up.  He was ready to just let it all fucking go.  Why did everything have to be so _hard?_

Nathan got up and fished up his clothes from the floor in silence, giving up on sleep for the time being to dress.  His body ached with his fatigue as he hauled himself straight to the bar, helping himself and drinking from the neck of a bottle as he stared into the tanks that surrounded his room.  Nothing grabbed his attention, but he looked quickly to one of the arched windows of his quarters – the night sky outside.  Stars, real ones this time instead of stares.  Because Magnus was dead.  He stared no more.

Nathan looked at the stars for five minutes, then raised the bottle again and drank deeply from it.  When he finished off the spirits that were left in it, he threw it at the wall to smash, grabbed another bottle, then turned around and left Mordhaus.  He just had to be sure.

His leaden feet carried him through the buildings that dotted Mordland, over the impacted, wasted earth towards the south.  The stars turned above him as he drank blindly; in fact, the planet moved below.  He was comforted by the weight of his body as the drink and fatigue pushed down on him, the gravity beneath him, sure that this was not his dream.  Nathan knew very little about the stars, except that they were on fire and that some of them were other planets.  He thought he would like to know more.  The night was cold around him, and Mordland appeared to be dead, no one else for miles.  And on the horizon, cut out black against the stripe of the galaxy, rose the warden tree.

Nathan’s chest tightened as he came to stand below it, feeling totally alone.  The tree was large, a huge Nordic ash that twisted above him with skeletal branches bearing weak sprigs of fresh growth, and where the ground had eroded at its base its gnarled roots were laid bare like piles of petrified curls.  The place which had been unearthed for Magnus’ bones was undisturbed.  The wind whipped Nathan’s hair around his neck as he eyeballed it for any evidence of tampering, his hand dangling the bottle by his side, and then turned his gaze upwards to the branches as they rattled with the breeze. 

As he strained his eyes against the dark, Nathan saw the little black buds forming along the branches.  The tree had been pretty much dead for the entire time they’d lived here, killed by mistletoe that had bulged its branches in thick swellings, but they’d left it as it was the largest tree on the property and Skwisgaar and Toki had both noted that it was a _Norse_ thing to have a warden tree, you know, like Yggdrasill, a tree that grew out of a burial mound and marked the transition between the realms.  Nathan thought that was pretty cool, a _grave tree_ , but he’d always figured it was dead.  There must have been something living deep within it that now it was budding – all it had taken was... giving it a corpse to feed upon.  Brutal.

The earth dropped away from him as Nathan looked up, the sky opening above him as he saw it.  At the end of each black branch a star, held for an instant to blink and flicker against the galaxy.  Black, white, blue, black.  A wave of depthless nausea flooded up within Nathan as he reeled back, the spirit sloshing in the bottle, and he knew this wasn’t a coincidence.  So here he was.  Instead of feeling reassured, Nathan just choked on his anger.  He staggered forward, his boot catching on the roots, and caught himself with a heavy hand against the rough ash bark like hitting a wall as he looked up at its crown again.

“You...” he slurred, unable to move, and glared up at the tree, “Always... thinking you know what to, like, do, you fuckin’...”

This was a bit too hard right now.  Nathan dropped his head.   “Asshole,” he grunted, and turned his hand against the bark to a fist.  “And now you’re dead.  So I guess you weren’t too fuckin’ smart after all, huh.”

The tree did not reply, save for the rattle of its branches.  Nathan straightened, his fist still against the tree, and the silence engulfed him.  To starve it back, he took a swig of the clear, burning spirit in the bottle.  Was it gin or vodka?  He was still so drunk from his baseline drinking that night that he couldn’t even tell.

“Uh,” said Nathan to no one, and looked up at the sky.  Though the stars still lingered at the ends of the branches above him, it was relieving to no longer see the Doomstar – clearing and yet frightening, here on the other side.  Knowing there was more to come.  Grunting, he turned his back on the tree and slumped against it, that body of it heavy against his back as he slugged from the bottle and gazed over his domain.

Magnus had deserved it, dying, but Nathan didn’t like it.  When they had first gotten Toki back, he’d been so angry to find out Magnus had gone and died before he could kill him himself.  What a fuck, to take that away from them – to hiss and spit on about _revenge_ and then deny them theirs.  What a fuck, what an absolute fuck, Nathan just wanted to fucking twist his neck like a dishrag but the fuck was fucking _dead_.  And yet somehow for all this violence, actually remembering pulverising the creep never felt good.  Rather this stewing guilt, knowing Magnus deserved it and yet – almost like – like Magnus had wanted that to happen.  Like he sucked so much, like --- literally sucked, like he sucked basic, yeah, and then he was a fucking black hole, _sucking_ – and there was no triumph in beating the shit out of him.  Instead Nathan felt, had felt, like a fucking sucker himself.  Like he’d been sucked in to doing it.  Like he hadn’t meant to do it.  And fuck, it felt so fucking awful, and he hated Magnus, hated him so fucking much, for the dagger, and for Pickles, and for Toki, and for fucking everything.  But he also --- he ----

He hated what he felt.  More than anything he felt for Magnus, he hated that.

Mordhaus towered in the distance before him, its windows lit with fireplaces and torches, burning yellow against the black blue night.  Warm against the formidable wilderness, the nothingness.  Nathan drank the burning spirit, leaning into the curve of the tree’s trunk, his hand roaming above to a low-hanging branch.  His fingers ran over the thin twigs at its end and, unthinking, he broke it off as he gazed back at Mordhaus, the branch snapping easily in his fingers. 

He turned the budding twig idly in his hand as he looked out across the land, a frown settling on him as a great and terrible sadness seemed to well up around him – at his back, a quivering but resigned hurt, unplaceable except as coming from the tree itself.  Nathan started as a warm liquid dripped sticky onto his knuckles, and – looking first at them and then up at the branch he’d snapped, saw the wound had begun to bleed a watery sap, stringing down from the branch to splat on Nathan’s hand and now the ground at his feet.

He grunted in disgust.  It was fucking warm as if the tree were a living body and looked almost exactly like cum, though syrupy and thin.  Fucking gross _._   As the sadness and hurt radiated from deep within the tree, warm and human against the cold night, Nathan looked up at it with a frown as he wiped his hand off on his shirt.  He was sorry, he hadn’t meant to hurt it.  But now that he looked he could see the bulging knots of the tree above him glistened with the liquid too – the whole thing bleeding, like it was covered in wounds, seeping with streaks of thin milky white like candle wax had been dripped over its limbs. Nathan stood up from it, the sadness less acute when he retreated – just a dimming, surrendering feeling, like the tree was watching – a sentinel – but that this had not been what it wanted to be, not this diseased, twisted thing rooted here, like it had been destined for so much more. 

But it was destined for this.  When Nathan rested his palm against the trunk again, he felt the same as he had always felt around Magnus – sadness, distance, resentment, reluctant guardianship finally accepted.  There was a peace to it.  Looking up at the tree, Nathan decided that that was what he had come out here to realise.  If Magnus had given up on trying to force fate’s hand, a string of destiny that wanted him dead and silent, condemned to the role of voiceless seer, just sadness and eyes, then it was, perhaps, possible that he could accept the same things.  Had he not done that tonight, by following the urging?  Even if it hadn’t been conscious.  Maybe it was time it was.

Nathan leaned back from the tree and wordlessly upturned the bottle of spirits onto the gnarled roots at his feet, the clear liquid’s stinging scent burning in the air as it seeped into the soil and darkened the roots.  Sometimes, you were a fuck and then you were a tree.  Served him right for being a vegetarian, I mean – really he should have seen this coming.  Nathan felt that it was right, that he should be imprisoned here rather than in hell; he was part of Dethklok, for all he’d harmed them, and it was right that he remained here, sighing, watching as he always had, now reluctantly warning.  Wasn't this a better hell for him, being forced to remain until he'd repaid them?  No voice to manipulate with, no blades to swing, all his anger surrendered.  Just that sad, watchful essence, something to gauge yourself against.  The only part of him that had been kind or useful; and it was right that it served them, standing at the edge of Mordland, a gallows tree.

As the alcohol ran over the roots, Nathan felt the sadness abate, a relief of a kind.  The bottle empty, he looked up at the towering black shape of the tree with a subdued, triumphant pride.  It was a last rites, he supposed, a final satisfaction.  “At least I know where you are now,” he growled to no one, and boxed the tree with his palm as he turned away to stalk back to Mordhaus, never to mention it to the others.  It didn’t matter.  It was right.  That soul was at peace.  Someday soon, so would they all be.

**Author's Note:**

> For little_murmaider, inspired in part by a conversation about the titular track with walkwithursus.


End file.
